3. Where do the emissions come from?
Indhold
3. Where do the emissions come from?¶
So far we have seen:
The global temperature is increasing
The global warming is strongly linked to CO2 emissions
Which countries are the main CO2 polluters
Now we will dive deeper into the social aspects realted to the CO2 emissions. Of course there are endless aspects that could be interesting. We will focus on the following three:
Population growth¶
It is more than apparent that the world population is constantly growing, yet the resources on earth does not grow with it. Every life that comes to join the big party has demand for food, shelter, clothing, and due to advancement in technology and living standards, the list has now become extensive with McDonalds to michellin star, straw roof to golden roof, cheap fast fashion to luxury clothing, iphone 13 and its dupes, scooters to ferarris etc. All that demands is shouting production, production and production! Which inevitably increases fossil fuel burning and thereby CO2 emissions. It has been found that 1% of population growth mounts to 1.28% increase in average CO2 emission and thereby, results in global warming [source]. Let’s take a look how the world’s average CO2 emissions has changed with respect to population growth over the 30 years span from 1990 to 2020.
It is quite apparent that both the world’s population and annual CO2 emissions have been increasing and the perentage change ratio between them has been greater than what was said to be 1:1.28 up until 2010. Around 2015,the increase of average CO2 emissions reached a plateu and in 2020 there is a rather significant decrease, meanwhile the population continues to grow, which is reflected in both plots. The reason for the slowed increase of CO2 emissions in 2015 is most likely due to more global efforts in tackling climate change, especially China for its tightened policies to deal with severe air pollution by burning less coal [source]. And in 2020, the COVID19 pandemic put the world in lockdown which either halted or reduced almost all industrial activities, hence the significant drop in average CO2 emmissions.
Energy consumption¶
With more people in the world and higher demand for living standards just mean that there are more mouth to feed and harder to suffice. We are consuming more and more energy as individuals. This naturally lead to higher global consumption for energy, hence we need to extract more oil, natural gas, burn more coal, and with great hope, turn more towards green energy sources like solar and wind.
And the increasing demand for energy is unlikely to decline considering emerging economies in both Asia and Africa as well as emerging technologies such as IoT solutions and Smart Cities.
The production of energy of course contributes to CO2 emissions, click the play buttom below to see how much each fuel/energy type contribute to world’s CO2 emissions.
As we can see coal burning has dominated world’s energy generation from the early industrialisation years and still is the most used fuel type together with oil, thereby still the largest contributer to CO2 emissions. From early 1990s we start to see the rise of other energy sources, which includes renewable energy and there seems to be a steady growth.
Human acitivities and Wealth (GDP)¶
So we are using more energy than ever before, but for what? The answer is that we travel and transport more, we are manufacturing more goods, we construct more buildings, we further industrialise our productions.
Please play around with the interactive pie chart to see how different kinds of human activity a related to the CO2 emissions of a country, a continent and the world.
Did you also notice how little of a fraction the whole of Africa and South America has out of the global CO2 emissions?
If we use more energy in order to meet higher demands of production that also means that we will generate more wealth, hence growing the economy. It is shown that there are clear correlation between increasing wealth and CO2 emissions.
However, not everyone creates the same size of carbon footprint. We know that wealth is not distributed equally between us, some live in extreme poverty and some can get their hands on almost every resource possible. And this would also mean that we contribute differently to CO2 emissions. Let’s take a look at how CO2 emissions per person changes depending on GDP per capita in 2018.
The pattern is extremely clear: Generally speaking, more wealth leads to higher CO2 emissions.